SoYoung Launches Recruitment Drive for 100 Medical Aesthetics Professionals Following E-round Funding

Following the completion of its Series E financing, a major task for So-Young is to expand its team and recruit more top-tier talent, particularly physicians.

SoYoung is currently recruiting 100 full-time professionals with medical backgrounds. Primary responsibilities include serving as physicians at the SoYoung Central Service Station, designing medical school curriculum systems, conducting professional information reviews, and formulating operational guidelines. Candidates with specialized expertise in energy-based devices, injectables, surgical procedures, pharmaceuticals, training, or consultation are all encouraged to apply.

SoYoung, founded in 2013, announced the completion of its Series E financing in September 2018. Within five years of its establishment, it completed eight rounds of financing (including a Pre-C round before Series C and an additional D2 round after Series D), emerging as another “unicorn” in the internet healthcare sector.

New Oxygen’s rapid growth is primarily attributable to the fact that medical aesthetics is one of the most market-oriented segments within China’s healthcare sector. Although private hospitals dominate this space, they face significant challenges in customer acquisition. Customers converted from beauty salons and nail studios typically require channel rebates amounting to 50%–70% of the total transaction value. Moreover, online comprehensive service platforms such as Baidu incur customer acquisition costs that are no lower than those of offline channel agents.

High marketing costs have created opportunities for the development of vertical platforms in the medical aesthetics industry. When New Oxygen was first established, it provided free traffic matching services. Over time, it gradually began to charge institutions commissions and advertising fees. Currently, the marketing costs for high-quality institutions on New Oxygen account for only 10%.

For doctors and consumers, joining the SoYoung platform is free of charge. Why is SoYoung recruiting full-time staff with medical backgrounds this time, placing doctors in a pivotal position? What new plans lie ahead? VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) provides an analysis.

On the So-Young platform, medical aesthetics consumers can compare prices and services across more institutions, browse the Medical Aesthetics Encyclopedia and plastic surgery diaries, and ultimately select their preferred institution to place an order and schedule surgery, thereby maximizing information transparency.

As early as 2016, driven by traffic aggregation and the growing influence of consumer reviews, large medical aesthetic institutions began to join SoYoung in succession.

New Oxygen initially attracted a cohort of physician-founded clinics. These doctors often possessed over a decade of clinical experience but remained largely unknown to the public, constrained by high marketing costs and the challenges of commercial operations. With platforms like New Oxygen, their professional expertise could be disseminated among consumers, thereby enabling them to build personal brands.

On the New Oxygen platform, there is a physician-founded clinic in Dalian that was established in 2015 and joined New Oxygen at its inception. The clinic currently employs one physician and four medical staff members, specializing primarily in rhinoplasty. The physician typically consults with several patients per day, performs one surgical procedure daily, and practices no more than five days per week, generating a monthly revenue of RMB 800,000 to 1 million.

Up to 90% of the clinic’s patients come from outside the local area, with 70% of its clientele sourced from New Oxygen. Consumers across China learned about this Dalian-based physician’s aesthetically pleasing rhinoplasty outcomes through user reviews on the New Oxygen app. In recent years, a growing number of physicians pursuing specialized practices have focused on niche, premium procedures and gained market recognition on New Oxygen.

To date, the SoYoung platform has attracted more than 7,000 medical aesthetic institutions to join. In 2017, online transactions exceeded RMB 6 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 300%, and drove the output value of the medical aesthetics industry to over RMB 15 billion. High-quality institutions and physicians are beginning to monetize their accumulated expertise on the SoYoung platform.

As a platform with medical attributes, So-Young always prioritizes safety. Only legitimate hospitals and licensed physicians can pass the verification process to join the So-Young platform. Furthermore, treatment items uploaded by hospitals and cosmetic surgery diaries written by consumers are also reviewed by professionals. So-Young enforces strict penalties against institutions that engage in fraudulent practices.

In 2018, the total number of medical aesthetics consumers in China reached 20 million. Given such a large base, medical disputes involving medical aesthetics users are inevitable. When disputes arise, consumers often have higher demands on the platforms. This is precisely one reason why doctors at major hospitals were once skeptical of medical aesthetics platforms: once a dispute arises from a surgical procedure, the consequences can be disabling or even fatal.

Therefore, the services offered by medical aesthetics platforms are not limited to online channels; rather, they require comprehensive empowerment of enterprises in terms of professionalism. This necessitates support from qualified medical professionals with clinical expertise. Consequently, one of the three strategic initiatives announced by So-Young during its Series E financing round is “expanding the team and recruiting more top-tier talent.”

Regarding the purpose of attracting more top-tier talent, Jin Xing, founder and CEO of So-Young, stated, “The approach in the healthcare sector differs from that of the traditional internet industry. While the latter focuses primarily on traffic volume, the healthcare sector requires in-depth engagement. Consumers in the healthcare space trust professional platforms, where professionalism holds greater importance than mere traffic.”

Among consumers of medical aesthetics services, So-Young has established high brand awareness. By building service barriers in depth, it has cultivated a professional and warm brand perception among existing users, thereby continuously widening and deepening its commercial moat.

Professionalism is ultimately reflected in service. The plan announced by New Oxygen this time can be mainly summarized into three aspects:

First, provide a full-suite service solution for medical aesthetics.New Oxygen provides all offline services except for the venue, including equipment, medical and nursing staff, consultations, design, pharmaceuticals, skincare products, and insurance. This service model is not based on on-site residency but operates on a mobile basis; specifically, New Oxygen establishes a central service hub to deliver support to various institutions, with service modules that can be combined as needed.

This solution is primarily applied to non-surgical procedures involving energy-based devices and injectables. The challenges associated with energy-based device treatments include high equipment costs, rapid technological obsolescence, and difficulty in predicting consumer preferences. With individual devices costing hundreds of thousands to millions of RMB, medical aesthetic institutions face significant financial pressure when purchasing such equipment. New Oxygen offers a shared-device model, allowing clinics to lease equipment on a per-use or daily basis, accompanied by comprehensive support services. This approach enhances the utilization efficiency of both equipment and personnel, thereby reducing operational costs for medical institutions.

Meanwhile, SoYoung is committed to building consumer trust in its brand by establishing standardized, integrated online services and safeguarding procedures. Consumers seeking a hassle-free experience can opt for SoYoung’s self-operated services to receive end-to-end protection.

Second, establish the New Oxygen Medical Academy.Specifically, by expanding its talent pool with professionals who have medical backgrounds, So-Young aims to enhance the overall professionalism of its service team. So-Young has established a medical academy to recruit medical professionals, evaluating and packaging the latest technologies and clinical experiences. These elements are then integrated into training curricula, combined with trends identified through So-Young’s big data, consumer complaints and feedback, and the company’s operational expertise, to provide comprehensive training and improvement for So-Young’s partner institutions.

Third, establish a core physician database.We are assembling a network of physicians in the medical aesthetics industry who possess the strongest market-oriented service capabilities. This initiative serves two primary purposes: first, to expand SoYoung’s core team of professional physicians, thereby providing platform users with more specialized services and guidance; and second, to establish a physician training and recommendation mechanism, ensuring that doctors included in the professional database receive greater promotional exposure from SoYoung.

The core physician database can be viewed as a complement to New Oxygen’s full-service solution package, as the latter primarily targets non-surgical procedures. In contrast, consumers seeking surgical procedures are more discerning in their choice of physicians, with prices correlating positively with the physician’s professionalism and reputation.

According to New Oxygen, the core physician database will establish promotion and elimination mechanisms to ensure regular updates and facilitate the mobility of medical talent. The metrics used to evaluate physicians include: academic publications, hospital tier and reputation, peer reviews among physicians, consumer reviews, and undercover investigations conducted by New Oxygen.

In an era where the personal brand of physicians is becoming increasingly vital, a cohort of doctors has previously built their reputation and advanced their careers through medical aesthetics platforms. For the vast number of physicians who have yet to achieve such recognition and advancement, New Oxygen’s current initiative in professionalization offers them a fully market-driven alternative to traditional hospital-based promotion—a path akin to “leveling up by battling monsters.”

This requires doctors to complete a three-step progression: from platform doctor, to core doctor, and finally to establishing a personal brand. To successfully navigate these three stages, doctors must not only possess exceptional professional expertise but also understand public aesthetic trends, integrate aesthetics with surgical practice, and demonstrate a strong service orientation. Achieving this demands external support and sustained refinement, an environment that SoYoung precisely provides.

New Oxygen aims to introduce self-operated services, branded services, and a core physician segment beyond its existing service scope, thereby implementing service tiering. This strategy serves two purposes: first, to target high-spending users by establishing professional service guarantees and brand positioning among them; and second, to improve the service capabilities of top-tier institutions, encouraging other industry players to follow suit, thus fostering a healthy development environment.

“Prices and services in the medical aesthetics market are becoming increasingly reasonable,” said Jin Xing. “It is highly challenging to establish a transparent and efficient market in the healthcare industry. An efficient market operates with its own mechanisms, under which unreasonable prices and substandard institutions will naturally be eliminated.”

Taking full-face autologous fat grafting as an example, the offline price in mainland China started at RMB 32,800 three years ago, with peak prices exceeding RMB 100,000. In Taiwan, China, the typical price for this service is RMB 13,400. Currently, due to increased information transparency, channel agents and consultants who previously earned high commissions are gradually exiting the market, driving the price of this procedure down to approximately RMB 10,000—a 70% decline.

With the business model established and players entering the market, the New Oxygen platform has already attracted 25,814 licensed physicians. The current size of China’s medical aesthetics market stands at RMB 220 billion, offering six times the growth potential compared to South Korea. In the future, a consumer base numbering in the hundreds of millions and a market worth over RMB 1 trillion will gradually unfold. This process requires greater support from high-quality physicians, presenting both significant opportunities and substantial challenges for doctors, platforms, and institutions alike.

Below is a letter from the CEO of New Oxygen to medical aesthetics professionals: